The Stream: 8.5.17

Time is funny, huh.

It’s really just the relative motion objects against each other, if you really think about it. The cycle of changes, corrosion of the shores of beaches; the progression of small to large to small again like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez patriarch. It’s just things moving against and around each other, to create a sense of motion.

Total illusion.

I mean, sure, you could argue that Time exists, sorta, but you can’t agree on its fixedness. For me time is a lot like silly putty, and that’s a good and bad thing. I mean, it is for everybody…

I need to stop thinking I’m special sometimes.

Luh you, me.

But hell, time doesn’t remain fixed for even a person who experiences a coherent reality all there own, why do we assume it’s not relative, or that it exists?

Because it’s always moving, would be my best guess.

There is somewhere out there, somewhere in the deep reaches of space between galaxies, the place where there are no stars, no light; the real in-between. True void. This place is timeless.

Because there are no objects with which to measure yourself against, and no way to measure movement, stillness is enforced. Because there is so great a distance between the stars, you can’t see them (that’s only really a thing that happens in galaxies).

Totally fucking Taoist.

I’m philosophical as fuck lately, but I like that abstract theoretical shit, so fuck it.

But think about a place of true black, where nothing movies, where there is no time. The place you go when you blink is as long and black as that infinity. Every time you blink, infinity.

And when you take yourself away from your desk, in orange warm light, take yourself beyond the golden moon, which loves you, fly beyond the masses, the gasses, the superclusters, the arrays of radiation and color, you become timeless.

That feels like a metaphor. But if we had the ability, it wouldn’t. That kinda shit blows my mind.

And sure, it’s a cold cold comfort. ‘Hey you guys, in the black coldness of the vacuum of space, there is a blacker, colder space where time doesn’t technically exist, nifty, right?’.

*Farting noise* Douchebag *Farting Noise*

But that nothing, the place where time isn’t, it’s behind your eyes; it’s where you go when you sleep; it’s what happens when you lose consciousness.

It exists in the deepest reaches of the sea. It exists in the lower animal impulses of your heart. It’s everywhere, it’s an ocean, and it’s somehow not totally overwhelming. It feels like an ocean that can mean anything, the blackness.

Sure, most could view it as despair. Nothingness, darkness, the void.

But me, I find it kind of beautiful. It makes everything on earth so delicate, so fragile, so unique.

It makes the light, valuable.

Objects and life both ascribe to economic functions: they’re valuable by dint of their rarity. If good were common, it wouldn’t be so precious.

By that same token, the spaces of timelessness are larger than the human mind if able to conceive of, or act in concert with. They probably make up most of the universe. The in-between is the large part.

So too is life. The same repetitive habits of being: waking up, beating off to fantasies – whether sexual or otherwise – shambling aimlessly from soggy drowse to wakefulness. Getting breakfast; standing in line and spacing out; ordering things online; going to bed, repeating. We are surrounded by a void of the mundane, and every day, in search of the spectacular.

So I search for the spectacular in the mundane, because there is so much more of it, and my life is richer.

The importance of mundane cannot be overstated. Standing, and being, just letting everything surround you is an overwhelming experience, if you let it. It’s a humbling sense of size, and power. The world is old, but young in the eyes of infinity, and here you are, some tinier speck than all of it. Even shorter and more effervescent and ephemeral and other 5 dollar words. You do shit, it happens, you revel and despair, and then you’re done.

And that always sounds so bad to people. It sounds bad to me, which is why I mention it. I always feel so delicate when I tell myself that. I feel like the design of a monarch butterfly’s wing. Fragile and beautiful and unreal when I shimmer in the sunlight.

But my tangential existence is not irrelevant, because I treat it as relevant. My belief in my relevance, validates my relevance, so I do not need anything more.

How magical.

And sometimes I lose sight of the infinitude and void. Sometimes I go to objects and materials, and pursue desire to its richest, fullest extent. But I feel empty, not void filled. And the difference is significant.

And that void has filled every great thinker since time immemorial. Joyce, Proust, Dante, Borges, Lao-Tzu, Dostoyevky, Tolstoy, Pynchon, Wallace et. al. They were simultaneouosly terrified and utterly compelled by the hugeness and largesse of nothing. How so totally it envelopes every human life in a shroud of terror.

That’s why detachment is so beautiful. It’s the scissors through the Veil. Life becomes as meaningful as you want it to be. You get to s feel everything. You get to feel the timelessness. When you blink, infinity.

That’s beautiful and meandering to me. I don’t know if my obsessions can ever be less abstract. Have some relatable terror to share and contradict myself with. For now, I’ll settle for having my head in the clouds, my heart in my heart, and my mind in the timeless distance between two galaxies.